The Ninth Type of Ghost

“Ghosts are imminently classifiable,” the professor was saying. “It is no coincidence that in every collection of ghost stories they seem to automatically sort themselves into their categories.”

I was sitting at the back of the classroom, auditing this night school course you might say, though in truth I was simply an interested observer. That course was titled “American Folklore and Belief Legends,” and this segment on ghosts only accounted for two weeks of the entire semester.

A mere two weeks!

I looked around and saw the ordinary smattering of types that you can see on any campus in any decade: the dorm boys and the sorority girls, the floundering-out-of-their-depths-campus-drifters, the assembly plant or state government workers who carved hard hours out of their evenings week after week in pursuit of a degree.

I decided my favorite was a rangy brunette of about nineteen who lasted about nine minutes into the lecture and then slumped forward and unapologetically fell asleep on her folded arms.

She had something there.

This fellow at the front of the class, I would put him in his early forties, corduroy slacks, shirtsleeves rolled up the elbow, a patchy red beard and hair just now starting to thin.

He was at the stage of today’s typical academic career, or so my musing led me, when he realized that he had another 25 years of this ahead of him, and the kids coming in weren’t getting any smarter, tenure wasn’t getting any easier, and establishing a specialty and then really owning it was getting harder and harder to achieve.

“Show me a small town and a cemetery, a creek and a bridge, an old stone house and the empty prairie surrounding it, a city street and an abandoned theater, and I will show you your ghost.”

He said this with a practiced ironic smile of one who had been there. And indeed, I had read that this fellow had put his time in in the field, tape recording story after story with townspeople, tracking down local legends, holding information-gathering meetings at every library large and small across the state.

The ironic smile though wasn’t to my liking, nor the way he unpacked it at just the right minute in his delivery.

It’s a point that hasn’t really received the exploration that it deserves, just how much a teacher at the front of the classroom is delivering a performance.

The real work is done early in the career deep in the library stacks or in a little back room in a cheap apartment, developing a series of lectures to spread throughout the upcoming semester.

If it has ever seemed to you that youngish teachers have a glazed exhausted look in their eye, well, this is the reason. You’re pouring a ton of work into a course of study and then slicing it into one hour sections. Those are the hardworking years in a campus career.

Granted, and while they do enrich over the years to incorporate new material and further development, what they really do, these lectures, one class after another, is devolve into theater. Repetition does that to your material.

The same jokes, the same pregnant pauses, the same patter, the same – as I think I have mentioned – the same ironic smile.

Any researcher is getting pretty far away from the passion he threw into his initial groundwork if all he can muster at this stage of the game is this ironic smile.

I thought of all the farmer’s wives, retired schoolteachers, city bus drivers, maintenance men, and park employees who had no doubt sat down with this fellow and told him of this or that haunting. It struck me that they wouldn’t feel well-served seeing that smile these many years later.

No doubt, I’m being too hard on the guy. I’m told I’m not a generous judge of character.

“My research has shown that there are eight types of ghosts.”

This too was the party line in the folklore game; when you want to bring a lot of data under control, really, no matter what the field, you develop a structure, a taxonomy, and start dealing your cards – your stories – into their proper bins.

“You have traditional ghosts, essentially the souls of the dead.

You have elementals, which we can think of as primordial entities that reside in certain locations and never roam outside their territory.

Poltergeists we know from the movies, invisible spirits that have the ability to move objects in the physical world, here we see the infiltration, however minute, of the spiritual realm into the reality that you and I inhabit.

You next have mental imprint manifestations, again, beloved by the movies, these are the scenes, sometimes dramatic, sometimes inexplicable, that play our visibly time and time again in front of the viewer’s eyes often at a certain time or date.

Crisis apparitions, common in wartime, where the spirit will appear to the loved one back in the peaceful countryside right at the moment his is killed on the battlefield.

Six is the kind of rearranger of time, when the modern day tourist in Venice or Florence turns a corner and walks into a scene out of the Middle Ages. Same location, same weather, same time of the day, but separated by centuries.

Seventh up are the ghosts of the living, which separate from their moorings to the self. Personally I find this one the most interesting; we’re not exactly talking a person’s soul in this instance, nor some sort of projection of self across time and space. It is more as if this entity represents the future state of the self after death and has traveled backwards in time for this very moment.

And then last but not least……the haunted object, the cursed urn on the mantle, the set of ancient keys in the cellar that have been locked away and only recently discovered, the strange misshapen object tin the curio cabinet that an ancestor brought back from his travels to an ancient region of the world. Is that eight? There you have it! The eight wonders of the ghostly world!”

This stirred the classroom a bit and everyone livened up, glad that the list had come to an end no doubt. It likely meant that class was over soon.

Students like lists, and you can recall why from your own days in the classroom: they lend themselves to note-taking and test-taking and really call for no independent thinking in the least.

Well, I had seen it all before, and I never did develop a taste for classification.

I admit that it does its part in bringing chaos into some sort of order, but it never gives full respect to the subject matter, I say,  and the whole category of ‘miscellaneous’ seems always to get swept under the rug.

“Full respect, what do I mean by that?” you might ask.

Well, without me knowing a thing about you let me propose that you are a white male of mixed ancestry, your IQ is respectable but no more than that, you have achieved no special distinction in your field of endeavor, what athleticism you once had is long gone, many of the plans of your youth have fallen into disrepair, you have way way dialed back your emotional response to people in trouble, your life span could be ample, could be, but of course cannot be counted on in any reasonable manner….

Well, you take my point. Do you feel larger now than when I started?

No, of course not. That’s what classification does to a soul, it turns it into an undifferentiated object, just one among many.

This was about the state of the ghost story these days.

It was under assault from one end of the spectrum from the folklore studies crew who lumped it in with tall tales, origin stories, native legends and the like. Once the field started to specialize in this manner, the special tang upon the tongue that the ghost story brings, that ever so feathery stroking of the fine hairs along the nape of the neck, just couldn’t stand up to all that dry recitation. Two weeks in a Folklores semester was about all that the poor ghosts got these days.

From the other end the movies, with their garish representation and the undoubted power that comes with visualizing terrors of the imagination in a darkened theater, had over time cheapened the experience.

Ironically – now I’m the ironic one! – ironically this steady bath of horror/terror/creepout had diluted the haunting experience and had calloused over a generation of moviegoers.

By this point of view people no longer see ghosts because they’re not equipped to. They’re not afraid because the senses they need to feel fear of the supernatural have been dulled.

Thus the fallen state of my chosen field; you can picture me saying this with a melancholy sigh if you wish.

I said as much to the professor after class, this was back in his offices.

“You were in class? I didn’t see you.”

I laughed. “Oh, when I say I was a few chairs southwest of the snoozing brunette, you’ll know just where I was.”

He laughed too at that. “Yes, they don’t give you much guidance when you’re getting your teacher’s degree what to do when your students fall asleep in class. Happens all the time though. A lot of these people work all day then drag themselves to campus three nights a week. So what can I do for you? You’re a student of the ghost story?”

“Yes, you could say that.”

“That’s where I earned my street cred, out in the field, taking notes on ghosts.”

“You sound like you’ve put it behind you.”

“Behind me? Well, emotionally maybe, the jury’s out on that, but physically certainly. I don’t think I could return to that pace. I must have talked to hundreds of people.”

“And…”

“And?”

“The question that everyone has asked you at one point or another. Do you believe? Did anyone ever convince you?”

“Believe?” He said the word as though it was the last word he would have chosen.

“Believe,” I repeated.

He went on. “I believe, let’s see, I believe in the voice of the people. I believe in the power of folklore and the power of the oral tradition. I believe in the human spirit and its need for expression. But no, I don’t believe.”

He had the grace to seem a little sad about this.

A campus at night is a different creature than in the day, and when classes have concluded the rooms and hallways and parking lots clear out faster than if a fire drill had gone off. It was certainly isolated back here in the professor’s office and the darkened hallway outside his door.

“Look, I was just packing up, my wife has dinner on the…”

“Don’t you think though that when you sort and categorize things you diminish them somehow? You take some of their power away, or seek to in any event?”

“Like the eight types of ghosts? Oh, that’s what you’re on about! Are you friends with Henry Chandler over at City College? You working with him? He tells me that I have too many categories, not too few. No, I’m pretty content with my eight, they seem to cover the territory, at least as far as I’ve seen.”

“Oh, I think there is at least one more type of ghost.” And as he froze into place and as I reached into and through him and pulled out his heart, which yielded as an apple surrenders to the soft tug of being plucked off a tree, I would guess that he’d have to agree with me.